Being able to choose research topics and craft my own syllabi in History & Literature meant that I could use my coursework to dig deep into magazine history, a longstanding interest of mine. For my sophomore tutorial, I went to Houghton Library to track down the original letters Frederick Jackson Turner's Atlantic editors sent to him as he adapted his frontier theory for popular consumption. My junior paper was about a 1912 series of essays inHarper's Bazar and "new womanhood." Senior year, I did archival research and oral histories for my thesis on the founding of New York magazine and immersed myself in accounts of New York City in the 1960s and '70s as I worked to understand the cultural context in which the magazine was created. Both my study of these magazines and the skills I learned in the process—how to execute research, think clearly, and write well—prepared me to begin my career in magazine journalism as a fact-checker at The Atlantic, where I now sit steps away from the magazine's bound volumes.